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Notes -
I think this is unfair to Death, because unlike @Lizzardspawn, he is not arguing for a nihilist materialism.
The model of a living being is a gross but useful simplification. It does not exist in the fundamental description of the universe. Any paradox about Schroedinger's cat or people being revived is strictly with the model, not reality.
For moral conceptions like justice, you can argue that they sometimes make models which can describe the behavior of humans, but that will not convince anyone to behave according to them. I am sure that @Lizzardspawn would concede that "human rights" are as much real as "Huitzilopochtli" in that both concepts explained some of the behavior of humans who believed in them.
As a noncognitivist, I tend to agree with Death that (prescriptive) ethics is not about what exists in the world (or even in more abstract realms like mathematics), but what you should or should not do.
People can have consistent (if horrible) moral systems which deny that one should not rape or even have no concept of consent at all, just as they can affirm or deny the axiom of choice, and there is no observation of reality which could falsify their system. But of course others can coordinate and build and enforce less terrible moral systems, where rape is defined in some law and punished.
For human rights, there is obviously no god who will strike you down with lightning if you break them, nor some special forces which will extract you to the Hague. Sometimes, the only difference will be how much the liberals will whine if someone kills you, few shed tears for Saddam.
But human rights as we have them today are also a preview of a work in progress. A mere 100 years ago, wars of aggression and reprisal killings were still considered normal. There is still more coordination to be done, more case law to be established.
Once again - I claim that rights are created by the state, flow from the state - if you check my previous comment in the thread. They don't exist outside of the state and are impossible without said state.
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